From Restaurant POS to Global Marketplace Infrastructure: How Lu Zhang Built Across the Transaction Chain

Lu Zhang's career in commerce did not begin with artificial intelligence. It began with a fascination for how complicated systems behave when several constraints have to work at the same time. Trained in architecture, Zhang became interested in infrastructure, transportation, regional economics, and supply chains while completing a Master of Architecture at the University of Michigan's Taubman College. Parametric design had a lasting influence on her because it treated outcomes as the product of interacting inputs, priorities, and dependencies rather than a single variable.

"That way of thinking stayed with me when I moved into digital products," Zhang said. "Parametric design taught me to look at relationships between variables rather than isolate one part of a system and assume it explains the outcome." Commerce gave her a new setting for the same systems problem, with pricing, inventory, payments, logistics, policy, and operating readiness all influencing what happens to a transaction.

Her first major step into commerce infrastructure came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she led the early product definition and 0-to-1 launch of Chowbus's first point-of-sale business line. Zhang defined the product vision and core transaction architecture connecting ordering, payments, merchant operations, and fulfillment for independent restaurants.

Chowbus co-founder and CTO Suyu Zhang has described her role in that early buildout as foundational, including her work on the core systems, data structures, and governance models that continued to support the platform as it scaled. The POS initiative ultimately became part of a much larger restaurant-technology business. By 2026, Chowbus reported $120 million in annual recurring revenue and approximately $4 billion in annualized processed transaction volume across all 50 U.S. states and Canada.

"Restaurant operations made the connections between systems very visible," Zhang said. "Ordering, payments, merchant operations, and fulfillment could not be treated as separate product problems because the restaurant had to experience them as one working process." Her responsibility required her to think beyond the point where a transaction entered the system. What mattered was whether the surrounding workflow could carry that transaction to completion.

Zhang's next move took her into freight infrastructure during the 2021-2022 U.S. port-congestion period. At NEXT Trucking, she worked on order-to-shipment and billing systems connecting ports with inland transportation. The operating environment was different, but the product challenge became broader because movement through one part of the chain depended on conditions elsewhere. A shipment that appeared ready in one system could still be blocked by transportation capacity, operational status, delivery timing, or billing conditions visible elsewhere in the workflow.

"Some of the hardest problems are the ones that do not belong neatly to one team," Zhang said. "The failure may show up in one place even though the cause sits somewhere else." She learned to translate fragmented conditions into a structure that engineering teams, operations groups, commercial stakeholders, and outside partners could execute. That cross-functional work became increasingly important as the systems she worked on expanded in geographic and operational scale.

Easyship widened Zhang's operating field substantially. In 2024, she served as Product Lead for the Easyship × eBay international shipping partnership. During her tenure, she led product work across the roadmap, system integration, global rollout, and live optimization, working across fulfillment, warehouse operations, routing, customs and compliance requirements, serviceability, and operational performance.

Jason Liu, an International Operations Manager at eBay who worked directly with Zhang on the partnership, described Lu as leading the product roadmap, integration, and live optimization while coordinating teams across Easyship and eBay.

The infrastructure connected U.S. sellers with buyers around the world while coordinating the operational complexity behind international fulfillment. Easyship's public materials now describe the partnership as supporting approximately 10.4 million international shipments annually, $3.68 billion in global merchandise volume, and commerce reaching more than 200 countries.

"Cross-border work forces you to understand that scale does not simplify the system," Zhang said. "It exposes dependencies that might have been easy to overlook when the environment was smaller." Her role required her to work across dependencies that multiplied as the program expanded into different markets, each with its own routing, fulfillment, and compliance requirements.

At TikTok Shop, Zhang moved further upstream into the transaction layer itself. Her work centered on platform-level decision architecture governing how pricing, eligibility, payment, merchant conditions, fulfillment feasibility, policy, compliance, and transaction-model rules came together before an order could move forward.

First-hand product-leadership documentation describes Zhang as playing a leading role in portions of the validation sequence and decision logic used at that platform-level decision point, including the conditions under which orders could proceed, require additional controls, stop, or reroute rather than push unresolved risk downstream.

She also worked on extending the transaction architecture to support new commercial structures, including Product Subscriptions and broader transaction and market configurations. At platform scale, those decisions were no longer confined to a single product surface: changes in transaction logic could affect what merchants, payment systems, logistics teams, policy functions, and fulfillment systems were able to do next.

"As the systems got larger, I had to understand more of what happened outside the immediate product surface," Zhang said. "A decision in one area could change what another team or system was able to do." Her experience had placed her at different points along the same commercial chain, from restaurant merchant operations to freight, international fulfillment, and platform transactions. Each stage increased the number of dependencies she had to account for and made narrow optimization less useful.

Across Chowbus, NEXT Trucking, Easyship and eBay, and TikTok Shop, the progression was not simply from smaller systems to larger ones. Zhang repeatedly moved into environments where product leadership required aligning commercial, operational, technical, and policy conditions before downstream execution could reliably begin.

Her role increasingly involved turning information scattered across different systems and organizations into decision structures that engineering teams, operations groups, commercial stakeholders, and external partners could implement consistently. The pattern was less about owning one isolated feature than understanding—and helping govern—how decisions traveled through the larger transaction chain.

Her work across those environments is complemented by the CPSM credential from the Institute for Supply Management, adding a professional supply-management credential to experience gained inside commerce platforms and logistics systems. The credential fits a career that has repeatedly moved across the boundaries between product infrastructure, merchant operations, and global supply chains rather than staying within one narrow function.

In 2026, Zhang's experience also began to take on an evaluative dimension. She was elected a Fellow of Hackathon Raptors following peer review by five existing Fellows, joining a professional community whose members contribute technical leadership and serve as hackathon judges. She also began serving as a judge for the University of Michigan Center for Entrepreneurship's Fuel program, evaluating student ventures seeking milestone-based funding and helping determine which teams advance to live presentations. Together, these roles extend her work from building transaction systems to evaluating how emerging technologies and business models can operate in practice.

Zhang now applies that systems perspective to increasingly automated commerce, but the foundation of her approach predates the current AI cycle. Architecture taught her to examine relationships among constraints. Merchant systems showed her what happens when those relationships affect daily operations, while global fulfillment and marketplace infrastructure revealed how quickly hidden dependencies become consequential at scale.

"Scale changes what you can afford to leave implicit," Zhang said. "The more markets, merchants, and systems involved, the more clearly the conditions have to be defined." Her career across the transaction chain has made that principle practical rather than theoretical. From restaurant point-of-sale systems to global marketplace infrastructure, Zhang's work has centered on making complex commerce systems operate as connected wholes rather than collections of isolated functions.